Thanks to everyone at last week’s “Water, Animals, and Arctic Climate Change” conference in Joensuu, 12-13 December 2018 (pdf programme here). Special thanks to Markku Lehtimäki and Arja Rosenholm of the Changing Environment of the North project, all the organizers at Joensuu, and Scott Slovic for an inspiring keynote and feedback on the presentations.

lieven.ameel@utu.fi

In this presentation, I will explore the trope of the balloon explorer in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), with a specific reference to Carl Schmitt’s idea of nomos (as proposed in The Nomos of the Earth (1950/2003), and drawing on the idea of visual agency. How does the balloon paronama, and the panoramic visual agency over the Arctic expanse tie in with the process of appropriation, distribution, and production involved in the construction of a nomos of the arctic? What kinds of mastery, and epistemological order, does the balloon panorama attempt? I will focus on Robinson’s futuristic novel, but will also draw on Philip Pullmans’s His Dark Materials, and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, literary texts that utilize complex strategies of imaginative worldmaking that involve arctic balloon exploration as a way of assessing new kinds of knowledge of humans’ relationships to their environment, but also as means of territorial and epistemological control.

picture source: https://blogs.uef.fi/cen-aqua/events/

The Croatian island of Vis, and the fishers’ village of Komiza, are a thoroughly inspiring setting for a conference on wavescapes in literature and culture. As always, experiences of space are in part already mediated by contact with earlier stories – so a few (admittedly random, and entirely personal) thoughts on my earlier, non-bodily encounters with Vis:

I was introduced to the island of Vis as a child overhearing talk of my grandmother’s brother’s exploits during the Second World War. The family had escaped Ostend to England at the beginning of the war and my great-uncle Pierre Beauprez had enlisted in the British army, in what would become the legendary no. 10 inter-allied commando of the SAS forces, consisting of soldiers that had fled occupied Europe. 3rd troop of 10 i-a commando would form the loose inspiration for Tarantino’s movie Inglorious Bastards. 4th troop was the Belgian troop, and saw Pierre Beauprez in action in ao. Italy, Walcheren, and Vis. He would survive the war, later enlist in the Korean war, where he died in action in 1951.

Pierre Beauprez

source: http://hmc2.pagesperso-orange.fr/en/spotl/korpersonalia.html

And it was again the events of war that brought me in contact with Vis later – this time the 1930 and 1940s memoirs of Fitzroy Maclean Eastern Approaches. Maclean, who acted at one point as British liaison officer with Tito’s partisans, describes the idyllic environments of the island being leveled by the Allied forces to make way for air bases to support the partisans. In fact I always found the most gripping parts of Maclean’s book the chapters that deal with his time in Russia, in particular his first-hand witnessing of Stalin’s purges and his explorations of Central Asia, which conveyed an urgent desire to “take the golden road to Samarkand” (to quote Mika Waltari, Hagar Olsson, James Elroy Flecker, and Maclean’s A person from England all in one).

The most impressive, and most recent, exposure to Vis, and to Komiza, came by way of Olga Tokarczuk‘s book Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, which recently won the Man Booker International. It’s one of the most memorable books I read recently (although unfortunately I’m not able to read it in its original Polish). I found the scenes set on Vis and Komiza – a fuga-like, ever-returning bead of stories telling of small-scale marital tragedy – particularly haunting.

Presenting my research at the Wavescapes conference in Split and Komiža (island of Vis), Croatia.

I changed around the topic of my talk a bit, and eventually examined fictional responses to rising waters in Let me be frank with you, Odds against tomorrow, and New York 2140. More on that research here.

Fascinating range of perspectives, including presentations on art practice, conservation, ecological thinking, waterscapes in particular national cultures as well as across national borders.

One session that resonated particularly well with some of my own research interests was a panel that featured Christina Heflin, who spoke of “Surrealism, Marine Life and Non-Ocular Modes of Sensing” in interbellum French surrealist underwater movies;  Srećko Jurišić, who presented on  “Amphibian Humanoids of the Mediterranean” in movie; and Eni Buljubašić on “The Adriatic monk seal in Croatian Narratives”.

Other fascinating talks including a presentation on a walk along “the zero meter altitude line into the hypothetical new coast line of the Netherlands”, a project by Maud Canisius; Killian Quigley’s presentation on the “Seascape and the Future of Land: Aesthetics, Ethics, and the Anthropocene”; and the keynotes, ranging from Adeline Johns Putra’s on “The shapes of water in climate fiction” to Rebecca Giggs’s on narrative non-fiction of the whale, and Joško Božanić’s considerations of practices and words in the eastern Adriatic archipelago.

On my way to the Tampere University of Technology for this year’s ALUS general meeting and mini-symposium. Looking forward to meet up with colleagues from Åbo Akademi, University of Tampere, University of Helsinki, University of Nottingham, University of London, among others.

On the agenda: overview of the latest activities of ALUS; with ao. our recent symposium in Stockholm; upcoming activities, with symposium next February at the University of Essen-Duisburg, and plans for a conference in Ireland later next year. And an overview of our recent publishing activities that have come out of ALUS events, including our latest book Literary Second Cities (Palgrave) and the forthcoming Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (Routledge). We’ll also talk about the new Palgrave series in Literary Urban Studies, which has published its first two volumes. Exciting times for the Associaton for Literary Urban Studies.

Program of the mini-symposium:

14.00-16.00: mini-symposium

‘Urban and rural spaces in the post-Second World War literature of the U.S. South’

Salla Toivola, Comparative Literature, University of Turku

‘The European City and Fantastic Literature during Modernity (19th century narratives)’ Patricia Garcia, Helsinki Collegium, University of Helsinki

‘Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond (1817) from island to country house to commercial metropolis: impressions of worldliness in fictions of development’ Aino Haataja, Åbo Akademi University

‘Heterodox City: Railway Arch Theology in the work of Maurice Davies and Moncure D. Conway’ Peter Jones, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Presenting my research project on “Narrating the Urban Waterfront in Crisis” today (24.9.) at TIAS, University of Turku, which I started in January of this year. What are the aims, what are the projected outcomes, and why does it matter?

It was an eye-opener to go back to the application for TIAS I wrote in 2016, look at what I envisioned and promise then, and see how aims, objectives, and focus have changed during the past few years.

One aspect is the increasing urgency related to climate change, and a range of relevant articles related to contemporary (city) literature that came out recently.

And then there is also a range of relevant books that has come out, changing the outlook of my focus – in Finnish literature, ao. with the recent publication of Beta – Sensored Reality (2018) and in the case of NY, that of New York 2140.

And why does it matter – not only for an academic community, but also for a broader audience or professionals with the planning and policy community? In part, the answer lies in getting at a better understanding of how narratives in urban planning, policy, and literature of (future) cities are structured and used, which may impact the assessment of ongoing planning and policy practices, and more generally visions of urban futures. It also matters because different textual genres have different limits and different possibilities in how they are able to posit alternative futures – so what can be expected from particular textual genres, and are there more effective ways to communicate (city) futures? And finally, I see an importance in focusing on the language with which city futures are framed, positing the crisis of future challenges in terms of a ”crisis of the imagination”, but with a set of concrete case studies and narrative methods.